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Bring back the plastic bag charge

Plastic bags: So useful, so undervalued, so numerous, and so destructive to the environment when carelessly handled.

Why not bag some of your gifts this season in reusable shopping bags with some recycled ribbon and tree decorations? This bag, sold by Bagnetic (bagnetic.com, 2 for $7.99), has magnetic rings on the handles for easy handling. The line was developed and is being marketed by Toronto-area green entrepreneur Ryan Bautista. (ELLEN MOORHOUSE / FOR THE TORONTO STAR)

One of Toronto's campaign ads, still viewable on the city’s website, features a frog sitting on a plastic bag in a pond. (CITY OF TORONTO)

Plastic bags. So useful, especially this time of year, so numerous and so destructive to the environment when carelessly handled.

It’s estimated the world uses up to a trillion of them a year – even though it wasn’t until the late 1970s that they became common in grocery stores.

And to think Toronto had a perfectly good system in place – the 5-cent retail bag charge – to curb our overuse. Alas, that’s gone and the proposed ban on plastic bags has vaporized in the face of potential legal challenges.

Toronto won international recognition for its 5-cent bag strategy. The Solid Waste Management Association of North America — SWANA for short — bestowed a gold award for communications excellence in 2011 for the city’s implementation of the policy. Indeed, one of the campaign ads, still viewable on the city’s website, features a frog sitting on a plastic bag in a pond; it alone deserves a prize.

These garbage Oscars may lack glamour. Award categories such as collection systems, transfer stations, landfill management or waste-to-energy excellence don’t have quite the same ring as best film or best actor. But SWANA counts about 8,000 members from industry and government (compared to the Motion Picture Academy’s 6,000). When Toronto and other Canadian municipalities bag SWANA awards, as they regularly do, they deserve credit.

The behavior-changing success of the 5-cent strategy in this ethnically diverse city of 2.6 million was impressive. A waste audit of single-family households showed a 56 per cent drop in “plastic bag generation” in 2010, compared to pre-ban 2008. Major grocery stores reported declines of 70 per cent and more. The city estimates Torontonians were using 242.2 million fewer bags a year, representing a net savings in waste management of $104,000.

Clearly a nickel goes a long way in promoting that most important of the 3Rs — reduce. Let’s hope council will change its mind next year when the bag issue is back on the agenda. In fact, I think stores should charge for all bags, both paper and plastic. And while we’re at it, let’s add coffee cups to the pay-for-it list. (The city’s most recent litter survey shows cups as a significant component.)

Like most, I have a love-hate relationship with plastic; so useful, but so pervasive and destructive as a polluter. But here’s why I prefer a charge rather than a ban on bags:

• Plastic bags have a smaller carbon footprint than the paper alternative. Paper may be compostable and less harmful to wildlife when we litter, but making or recycling it carries significant environmental costs.

• We reuse plastic bags, notably for garbage. If retail bags were banned, many of us, especially apartment dwellers, would be reduced to buying single-use retail-size plastic bags for household garbage. How environmentally friendly is that? Plus Toronto’s green-bin program has been designed for using plastic bags in our kitchen catchers.

• Toronto has a recycling program for plastic grocery bags. (You stuff one bag full of other bags, tie the handles and put it in your blue bin.) Committed recycler Chuck Burke says there’s a huge unsatisfied market for the material: He shipped almost 500 tonnes of used bags and film to Central America in August to be turned into flooring.

So, there you have it: With the nickel charge or something similar restored, Toronto’s strategies truly would promote the 3Rs of reduce, reuse and recycle when it comes to plastic bags. So, council, please do the right thing next year, and retailers who continue to charge the 5 cents, please continue.

In the meantime, let’s hope the good habits fostered by the three-year fee on bags continue in its absence.

Jim Harnum, Toronto’s new general manager for solid waste, is optimistic. “I don’t think if a person who chooses consciously to start bringing a reusable bag is going to go back to a plastic bag. So from our standpoint, that’s the good news.”

And his ideal bag option? “The small reusable polyester bags. They look like cloth but they’re polyester,” says Harnum. “We recommend them over cotton, over paper, over plastic, over anything. They’ve got the smallest carbon footprint if you use them 11 times.”

What a great way to wrap your gifts this holiday season — with an attractive, reusable cloth bag tied up with a bow!

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